Black and grey realism tattoo of a feather on the upper chest, near the collarbone and shoulder.

Feather tattoo on upper chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded feather tattoo runs diagonally across the upper chest, with its quill pointing down towards the centre of the body. The barbs are rendered with soft grey shading and fine hatched lines, giving the feather a three-dimensional look. The photo is black and white, taken at an angle with a car headrest and dark top visible in the background.

Realism Chest Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came early that year, so hard the water trough skinned over by seven. Mabry Coyle found the feather caught in the gate latch while she was breaking ice for the ewes, a long grey thing with a quill as thin as a wheat stalk, and she stood holding it until her fingers ached.

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Her grandmother had always said a feather left on a gate meant a bird had passed over going south, and a bird going south in winter carried word from those who had gone ahead. Mabry had heard nothing from her brother Ruben since the autumn he took the boat from Cork. She put the feather inside her coat, against her breastbone, and fed the ewes with her mind on nothing else.

That night the wind came round to the north and the snow followed it, the kind that shuts the road for a week. Mabry sat by the range with the lamp turned low and told the feather what she had told no one: that the roof leaked over the byre, that the bank had written twice, that she was tired of being the one who stayed. The feather lay on the table and did not move, which was no surprise to her.

Three days later, when the drifts had softened, she saw a figure coming up the lane with a bag on his shoulder, walking slow and leaning into the wind. She did not run. She went to the gate and found the latch bare, the feather gone, and then she saw it had been pressed flat into the snow of the post, its quill pointing up the lane toward him as if it had known the way all along.